Nick Hornby reading his book High Fidelity at home for OSM magazine Books Special. Photograph: Richard Saker

In Nick Hornby's 2009 novel Juliet, Naked, an adoring male fan of Tucker Crowe, a fictitious former rock star, compulsively studies the musician's Wikipedia internet biography in an effort to get closer to his idol. But it becomes clear that several of the putative facts listed are complete red herrings.

It is a cautionary tale for all those who want to piece together the likeness of a famous person from an admiring distance. Hornby, it seems, has a heightened sense of how doomed such an enterprise might be or, perhaps, he simply has a heightened sense of how exposed a famous person is to amateur analysis.

On Friday, the bestselling writer, creator of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, launched a laudable public enterprise that aims to put the act of storytelling ahead of all the other distractions surrounding his celebrity. The Ministry of Stories Literacy Project will turn an empty shop in Hoxton, east London, into a purveyor of monster supplies intended to draw a stream of young people across its threshold. Once inside, the children will find, in Hornby's words, "a ministry of stories secreted behind its humble facade".

"It will mean a lot to the project," said one good friend of Hornby's who applauds the literacy initiative and sees it as typically generous of spirit. "Usually, if you appear at a public event with a writer, just a few people will turn up. But if you go with Nick, then hundreds of people are already there waiting to see him and queuing round the corner. So it's great he uses this popularity altruistically. Most writers would just stay at home."

The immense appeal of Hornby's books has given him power, it is true, as well as some hefty clout with other creative types. When Hornby celebrated the Memphis musician Ben Folds in his book 31 Songs, Folds himself was prompted to contact Hornby to ask him to write some lyrics. The duo subsequently made an album together.

Much of Hornby's fiction has focused on the way people approach the passions of their lives. Men, he appears to argue, have an obsessive and proprietorial attitude to the things that interest them. Characteristically, they list and organise their lives in order of priority or type. It is not a new idea: a key scene in the 1982 film Diner covers similar territory when Ellen Barkin's character is berated for filing her boyfriend's James Brown record under J instead of B. Yet it is a gender mismatch that Hornby has made his own.

Any list of the top dyspeptic obsessives in Hornby's books would start with the writer himself, as he appears in the football memoir Fever Pitch, then move on to the music fan at the centre of High Fidelity, before namechecking Duncan, the Tucker Crowe disciple from Juliet, Naked.

His books are sometimes glibly dismissed with the term "ladlit", the implication being that they are designed to please the man who reads few novels. If so, that would hardly bother Hornby. He detests snobbery in publishing and especially celebrates writing that seems effortless.

"I always thought Of Mice and Men was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication," he once said of John Steinbeck's American classic.

He claims to have drawn comfort too from John Carey's book, What Good Are the Arts? Carey's line of argument is that no art form is intrinsically superior to any other. Writing in Eggers's American literary magazine, the Believer, he once again extolled the virtues of invisible style and lashed out at self-conscious literary flourishes: "I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes."

Hornby grew up in the suburbs with his mother, Margaret, in what he has described as "a Barratt home in Maidenhead". His father, Sir Derek Hornby, a successful businessman, left the home when Hornby was 11. The boy took solace in the public library, throwing himself at first into the Jennings football series and Richmal Crompton's Just William stories.

"Home was extremely normal," he has said. "But my dad's life was quite exotic really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home." Hornby's father had started another family and lived with them in France and America.

Cambridge came next for the teenager, with three years spent earning a degree he came to regard as pointless. "Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay," Hornby has said.

All the same, the graduate went on to teach English at a comprehensive before dropping out to stake his livelihood, unproductively, on becoming a screenwriter. His love of football, and of Arsenal in particular, finally paid off when his memoir, Fever Pitch, became a publishing sensation. By then, Hornby was married to Virginia, the long-suffering girlfriend who appears at the close of the book, and in 1993 the couple had a son, Danny.

It was clear from early on that their boy had problems and a diagnosis of autism was to follow. His parents endured an exhausting trek, with no clear destination in sight.

"Having Danny is like the stress of having a newborn permanently – that kind of disruption with a newborn's first weeks, and there's no change to that," Hornby explained a few years ago.

Eventually, the writer, together with the parents of other autistic children, set up the influential TreeHouse school in north London which has pioneered an American system called applied behaviour analysis. The school coffers have been boosted ever since by cash from Hornby's big contract with Penguin and from his deals for the films of his books.

He speaks to Virginia about Danny every day, but the couple are now divorced. The pressure of looking after their son was, Hornby concedes, "a huge part" of the marriage breakdown: "It exposes immediately whatever flaws there are."

Since then, the author has had two sons with his second wife, film producer Amanda Posey, the polished beauty he met while making Fever Pitch. On the concept of lasting love in general, Hornby has written: "We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons."

Posey recently wrote up her trip to the Oscars to mark the nomination of An Education, a film she produced and Hornby scripted: "Inside the party it is a real squash and then you see somebody really famous close up, which feels odd because you are used to seeing them from a distance," she wrote, but the shock of colliding with celebrities may have been exaggerated. The couple are well-connected and Hornby's sister, Gill, is married to the millionaire novelist Robert Harris.

A close friend suggests the author now aims to develop as a screenwriter, but that his love of books is undiminished. Hornby talks about them all the time, apparently. It is another obsession, riding alongside his love of football and music.

In a recent Spanish interview, he gave vent to his views on writing. "This idea that 'literature' can somehow survive without a contemporary readership is new and I suspect wrong. There is a particularly dreary kind of literary writing which quite clearly aims for posterity – I'm not interested in reading it and I'm certainly not interested in writing it. As for the reflection of popular culture – I don't think this has much to do with anything, because clearly one can write about popular culture in a way that excludes. I don't want my books to exclude anyone."

And now Hornby has put his money where his mouth is, bringing Eggers's crusading spirit to the streets of the capital in an effort to make writing a universal skill. As the American writer said this weekend: "The most democratic means to self-empowerment is through education and the written word and a centre like the Ministry of Stories will be life-changing for the youth of London."

It seems Hornby is now sharing his third obsession – his love of books – with the wider world. But this time there will be no prescriptive or provocative lists. Instead, anything goes. Children will be encouraged to let rip.

And if Hornby ever wants to retreat to a more ordered world again, he will have to write another novel. Surely that is the ultimate way to communicate on an uninterrupted frequency and to be known without people poking about for personal details or assembling your personality from quotes and anecdotes and Wikipedia notes.